Brian Damage balances anxiety, absurdity on ‘All Hell Broke Loose’

Brian Baker wrote the songs populating new Brian Damage album All Hell Broke Loose in the early days of the Covid pandemic, and the sense of paranoia and anxiety that shaped that time is often reflected in his words. Witness “Soap on a Rope,” a psychedelic romp where even shuttered away at home the narrator can’t escape prying eyes. “You’re being watched, every move,” Baker sings, filling his verses with references to camera-equipped smart TVs and inner-monologues escaping quarantine as they’re broadcast far and wide via social media.

“All of these songs were written during Covid, where you’re staring at your phone and your phone is staring back at you,” said Baker, who joined Brian Damage bandmate Hillary Jones for an early August interview ahead of the group’s record release show at Spacebar on Friday, Aug. 8. “[‘Soap on a Rope’] and ‘Snakes’ are utterly paranoid to the point where it’s like, are you okay, Brian?”

The answer, at least at the time, might possibly have been no, with Baker acknowledging that he’s “a totally different person” now than he was when he and band member Adam Hardy first tracked the rough demos of the songs. “I was just sort of drunk and depressed and unfocused. I was just really confused, basically,” said Baker, who described the pandemic as a turning point that began to introduce a sense of clarity and then degrees of personal growth. “It takes a little bit of time for you to look back and see what you were going through. … I feel like if you’re in trouble emotionally, it’s not always apparent to you, because you’re just going through life and trying to live each day the best you can. But when you look back on that era, you can clearly see you were a mess.”

Not that All Hell Broke Loose plays as an emotionally wrenching tale of transformation, Baker frequently injecting the songs with the kind of humor one might expect from a musician who titled the band’s 2022 album Shit for Brians. The prog-inspired “Leather Sandwich,” for one, opens with a heartwarming couplet – “Everywhere you go/There’s always someone you know” – before it makes a sharp pivot, Baker citing the overwhelming desire these people have to “throw you under the bus.” Then there’s “Soap on a Rope,” on which he sings of the countless dead relatives watching over you from heaven… as you masturbate. Even the slouching, synth-driven “Snakes,” a track on which the narrator envisions themselves surrounded by enemies, includes a line about these serpentine forces slithering forth to leave a steaming turd in their lawn.

“They’re supposed to be kind of funny,” Baker said. “They’re humorously paranoid.”

Baker began to reshape the rough early demos about 18 months ago, first overdubbing the drums, which he said helps to create a framework that can then be fleshed out by keyboards, bass, drums and backing vocals, like “coloring in the lines of a coloring book.” Additional vocal harmonies arrive courtesy of Jones, with Baker drawing a sharp contrast between the quality of the pair’s voices. “It’s me singing like a toad and then Hillary sounding like an angel behind me,” said Baker, who also plays alongside Jones in Hi Helen, in addition to his roles in countless other Columbus bands, DANA and Jocks included. “It’s funny, every person in Brian Damage is the singer of a band, and they’re all way better singers than I am.”

Brian Damage has gone through several lineup iterations in its five-ish years of existence but currently features Baker and Jones along with drummer Chris Mengerink, synth player Alex Douglas, and guitarist Adam Hardy. Born in part out of lockdown boredom – the earliest rehearsals took place at a pandemic-shuttered Spacebar, where Baker worked at the time – the band has existed from the start purely as a form of release, the musicians bashing out tunes for the fun of it rather than creating with a larger aim in mind. “I mean, besides trying to take over the world,” Baker said, and laughed.

And yet, Baker allowed that in that more freewheeling pursuit certain things did shift within him, opening him up in ways he couldn’t have then anticipated coming into the project. “It made me less shy about sharing music with people,” he said. “It’s easy to be shy and bashful about showing people the songs you write. There’s a vulnerability there, and sometimes that can be difficult. But I think it made me be more like, who cares? Just release music. You’re working on it. It’s your life. This is you. This is who you are. And there’s no sense hiding it. So, yeah, it was like, just record and release as much music as you can. And have a blast.”